Destination Goal, Journey Goal, Crappy First Draft
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ali's three-step goal-setting process, articulated while writing the goals chapter of his book. It resolves the tension between vague effort goals ('do my best', 'make something I'm proud of'), which are open-ended enough to either let you off the hook or torment you, and outcome goals like bestseller lists or view counts, which sit outside your control. Step one sets a destination goal that is genuinely within your control. Step two converts it into a quantity-based journey goal — words per day, videos per month — which is specific, controllable, and drained of the emotive quality that makes creative goals go wrong. Step three deliberately lowers the quality bar in the wording of the task itself, so the daily action becomes small enough to actually start.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Set a destination goal inside your control
Define the big project as something you can execute — write a book I'm proud of, make a video I'm proud of — rather than a result the world decides, like a bestseller list placement or a view count.
- 2
Demote the outcomes to preferred indifferents
Acknowledge the outcomes you'd enjoy — hitting the lists, conference invitations, podcast appearances — then explicitly classify them as outside your control and stop thinking about them.
Pro tip Naming them once removes their pull better than pretending you don't want them.
- 3
Convert into a quantity-based journey goal
Break the destination into a recurring quantity: this many words per day or week, this number of videos by a certain point. Quantity goals are specific, within your control, and mechanistic rather than emotive.
Pro tip Quality-framed goals go wrong because they are so emotive; there is something genuinely useful about a very mechanistic target in creative work.
Watch out Pure 'try your best' goals are not SMART, and they either let you make it easy for yourself or leave you constantly tormented asking whether this is really your best.
- 4
Write the task with the quality bar lowered
Put the low bar into the wording on the to-do list itself: 'write 500 crappy words for crappy first draft of chapter two'. Using the word twice makes the task feel doable.
Pro tip The wording is the intervention, not a mindset trick you perform separately — write it down that way.
- 5
Aim for dailyish, not an unbroken streak
Borrowing from Dan Harris on meditation, target doing it daily-ish with built-in fuzziness. You still know whether a week counted, but you remove the all-or-nothing streak logic.
Watch out Rigid streaks create the failure mode where breaking one leads to three weeks of doing nothing at all.
- 6
Stop when the quota is met
When you hit the number, stop — even if it's going well and another 500 words would come easily. Walking away enforces the low ball and protects tomorrow's session.
Watch out This is genuinely hard for high performers: the opportunity for a bit more productivity arises and not taking it feels wrong.
In the wild
Ali applies the process to the book he is writing during the season. The destination goal is a book he is proud of — his to execute. The outcomes he'd love, bestseller lists and conference invitations and podcast bookings, get named and set aside as outside his control. The journey goal becomes a daily word count, a few hundred to a thousand words. And the task on the to-do list reads 'write 500 crappy words for crappy first draft of chapter two', with the word crappy appearing twice on purpose, because that phrasing is what makes sitting down feel doable rather than intimidating.
→ The intimidating project becomes a repeatable daily action he can actually start.
A creator sets the goal of hitting 100,000 views on their next video and spends every upload refreshing analytics, concluding after each one that they've failed. Rewritten through the framework: the destination goal becomes making videos they are proud of; views are named once as desirable and then deliberately dropped as uncontrollable; the journey goal becomes one video published per week; and the weekly task is written as 'record a rough first take of a messy script'. Twelve weeks later they have twelve videos, which is the input that produced the views in the first place.
→ Consistent output replaces analytics-checking, and the uncontrollable metric follows the controllable one.
Common mistakes
Setting 'do my best' as the goal
Open-ended effort goals are not specific and not SMART. They either let you off easy — that was my best, so I don't care — or trap you in constant self-interrogation about whether this really is your best, which Ali's guest describes doing throughout his early adulthood.
Anchoring on outcomes you don't control
A goal of a specific view count or bestseller placement hands your sense of progress to an audience, an algorithm or a chart. The framework keeps the ambition but relocates the measurable target to something you execute.
Setting the daily bar at your best day
A high-quality daily quota makes starting intimidating and turns the project into a scary thing you avoid. Lowering the bar in the task wording — and deliberately stopping when the quota is hit — is what keeps the project approachable across months.
From the transcript
“i don't like it when i set goals that are outside of my control”
“step number one setting a kind of destination goal that is within my control like write a book”
“i literally write my to-do list write 500 crappy words for crappy first draft of chapter two”
From the episode
6 Lessons That Improved My Life - Season 2 Round Up
Season 2 Round Up